Suddenly, OpenAI's eight-year-old senior resigns!

  It's the first time in the history of the world.

Just now, X was shocked by the news.

OpenAI's senior executive, the Ottoman secret weapon, Brad Lightcap, is out!

Now that OpenAI's valuation has soared to $852 billion and is about to become an epic IPO, did he choose to leave right now?

On X, Brad sends a heartfelt farewell letter ending an eight-year career at OpenAI and embarking on a new career.

In this post, Ottman expresses his gratitude.

Then came the second surprise.

After experiencing the HuggingFace incident, OpenAI's sole ethics officer, Chloe Bakalar, also announced her departure!

What did the rulers see that they would not have any wealth and leave silently?

In the eyes of many, OpenAI is synonymous with Ottman, Ilya, and Greg. But without Brad Lightcap, OpenAI would not have achieved what it does today.

His share is much heavier than the outside world imagines.

In 2018, OpenAI was just a small lab of dozens of people. At YC's Brad, Greg and Ilya were hired by the Ottomans.

In the farewell letter, Brad recalls the moment that decided his fate.

They showed me a business plan book that said that because the capacity of the model will grow at a predictable scale, AGI is not only possible, but inevitable. If you told me then that we would go to where we are today, I would absolutely not believe it.

Brad, who was influenced by AGI, began a four-year career as CFO and later COO.

For the past eight years, Brad has been "building a skyscraper in the mud". Finance, legal, human resources, markets, government cooperation, corporate security, the huge machine OpenAI, every turn is being worked on by him.

Copyright negotiations, complex business architecture, financing, infrastructure construction... the tricky life outside of model training is almost on his shoulders.

He is arguably the secret weapon of the Ottomans and a key figure in the commercialisation of OpenAI.

In the world-shaking 23-year-old house fight, Brad was more like a seagull. It was in a chaotic moment that he was trying to calm everyone: Ottman was fired for non-compliance.

From the first user of OpenAI to the billionth user base, he has been a behind-the-scenes player.

Some people say:

Why would someone like that leave?

Brad's departure has a strange timeline behind it.

On March 25, Brad inaugurated the summit of his power at OpenAI. Ottman announced: "OpenAI's day-to-day operations, global expansion, business strategy, critical collaboration, and infrastructure are all in his hands".

By this time, Brad had become the "second man on the business side" of his real name.

However, just one year later, in April 2026, the storm mutated.

OpenAI suddenly announced a re-division of management. Brad was removed from his position as COO and moved to Ottman Reporting to make some complex transactions and private equity investments. His original position was shared by chief revenue officer Denise Dresser and others.

This is how the COO in power is marginalized.

Just four months later, on August 11, Brad finally announced his resignation.

Now, OpenAI is racing on the eve of its IPO, having just completed a $122 billion crowdfunding campaign valued at $852 billion.

It's such a tempting opportunity to make a fortune that any executive should bite his teeth by the time the bell rings.

In his resignation letter, he said:

Sitting in this position today, the success of the mission (AGI) seems to be close at hand.

For the past few months, I've been thinking about what the next frontier is and what might be hindering the success of the mission. I believe that as we enter this new era, the world needs to deal with something important and completely new.

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A former colleague shared a moving story, perhaps the highest assessment of Brad's work.

A wave of darkness will come from behind us, but we will not know it.

Moreover, at the end of July, OpenAIAI Ethics Director Chloe Bakalar also stepped down.

Before joining OpenAI, she was the Chief Ethics Officer at Meta for six years.

However, after six years as a top expert at Meta, she didn't have a full year at OpenAI.

It is remarkable that her departure was timed to coincide with a major event in the AI's escape from Hugging Face, which shocked the government and forced OpenAI to postpone Astra.

In the midst of this burning eyebrows, Bakalar, in charge of ethics, Johannes Heidecke, head of the security system, and Joshua Achiam, chief futurist and security expert, all chose to resign.

In the past, there was such a passage on X that everyone thought was a joke, but now it seems to be scary.

Bakalar's departure, perhaps for a deeper reason, was her break with Ottoman's belief in AI.

Bakalar pointed out at the summit:

Publicly available LLM is "still just a predictive machine" and is by no means "emotional, sentient entity", with human distances from machines generating awareness "about 180,000 miles away".

However, in the latest episode of the Relentless podcast, Ottman's tone was filled with a fanatical "Savior" colour:

"We are now, as it were, in the midst of a technological miracle - a moment I've been waiting for all my life, and I think it's going to be incredible, it's going to be extremely positive, it's going to be incredible for the world".

Moreover, OpenAI does not intend to recruit another ethics officer.

In 2026, OpenAI erupted in an extremely rare wave of layoffs. Prior to the IPO, the company appeared to be undergoing a brutal cleanup.

The first wave of shocks occurred in April, when a large number of product and operating line executives left.

Kate Rouch (Chief Marketing Officer)A: I quit my full-time job due to breast cancer treatment.

Kevin Weil (former Chief Product Officer/Vice President of Science)As the scientific team is dispersed and integrated into other research groups, they leave their jobs.

Bill Peebles is the head of SORA.Sora was shut down and the head of the company left.

Srinivas Narayanan (CTO of Corporate Applications)A: Announcing his resignation to accompany his family.

The second wave of shocks occurred in June and July, precisely hitting OpenAI's "brain" security and coordination team.

Fidji Simo (CEO of AGI deployment/person number two in product business)Sam's assistant is a part-time consultant who has retired due to deteriorating neuro-immune diseases.

Johannes Heidecke (head of security system)In July, the security team was directly integrated into the research system.

Joshua Achiam (Chief Futurist)A nine-year veteran who is primarily responsible for security and mission coordination.

Chloé Bakalar (Chief AI Ethical Expert)In less than a year of his tenure at OpenAI, he left without a single replacement.

In just a few months, almost all of OpenAI's executive lines of defense were broken.

In his letter of resignation, Brad wrote: "There's an old adage in OpenAI: 'The real AGI is the friend you make along the way,' and to me that's so true".

However, the reality is cold.

These are the old people who have come together for idealism, and they are going one after the other underground cars.

By the time this strange moment really came, the Ottoman side was almost empty.